Once they were punk misfits, who upset their crowd with metal covers. Then they got confused for metallers, and irked that audience with Commodores songs. Now, the re-formed band are suprised to find that fans love them for their contrariness

When the Californian rock band Faith No More broke up in 1998, they released the perfect swansong. Despite their mainstream success and festival-headliner status, their quixotic, dysfunctional career was fundamentally defined by kamikaze contrarianism and a wicked, sometimes baffling sense of humour. So what better epitaph than the lyrics of their final single, a cover of the Bee Gees’ I Started a Joke? “I started a joke which started the whole world crying/ But I didn’t see that the joke was on me.”

It turns out that the story behind the cover version is somewhat less poetic. “We had a night off in Guam and we went to some military bar,” bassist Billy Gould explains. “There were big-screen TVs showing hardcore porn and they started playing I Started a Joke on karaoke.” He grins: “It was like God speaking to us: ‘You have to do this song.’”

This is Faith No More’s kind of story: lurid and absurd. In the 90s, they amused themselves by feeding interviewers jokes, wind-ups and outrageous anecdotes that may or may not have been true. Back together in middle age, they’re expected to be more serious and it’s clearly a strain. Nesting in a corner of the Met Bar in London, frontman Mike Patton is suspicious and combative, instinctively resisting the premise of every question before reluctantly cooperating. Keyboardist Roddy Bottum, who speaks in a wry, distracted drawl, is only slightly more helpful. In the absence of drummer Mike Bordin and guitarist Jon Hudson, it’s left to Gould to keep the show on the road with direct answers. But even he screws up his face when talk turns to Sol Invictus, their first album in 18 years, and the older-and-wiser narrative that comes with it.

“I kind of resist this,” he says with a heavy sigh. “There’s certain things we’re expected to say like, ‘Well, we didn’t communicate then but we’re more mature now and we’re happier than we’ve ever been.’ I hate to encourage that kind of thing because it’s always the same fucking story, y’know?”

Bottum nods: “It’s a little bit too tidy. We’ve made fucked-up decisions our whole career. I think that’s why the English embraced us. It feels to me that the English love to champion fucked-up Americans.”

Arguably, Faith No More’s strange career can better be explained by a category error. They may have broken through, with 1989’s platinum album The Real Thing, in the era of Guns N’ Roses and Poison, but they originated in San Francisco in the early 80s. They were post-punk misfits who became mistaken for metalheads. It was bound to cause problems.

“We didn’t really relate to the era that accepted us,” Gould agrees. “We grew up going to shows where there was always a bit of confrontation. That was part of the fun. All of a sudden we’re playing in front of Poison fans and they’re not experienced in that. They think if they throw something at us we’re going to be hurt and offended but it actually excites us. Even if people get mad there’s an engagement.”

Bottum describes the fledgling Faith No More as a “sort of weird art project” with a shifting lineup that included a young Courtney Love. After settling on charming but erratic frontman Chuck Mosley, they made their first great song, We Care a Lot, in 1985 – a brilliantly sarcastic funk-rock response to Live Aid and We Are the World: “We care a lot about disasters, fires, floods and killer bees …”

“We were watching a lot of MTV at the time, in a really sadistic, cynical way,” Bottum says. “We were wiseass kids from Los Angeles and San Francisco was a very highbrow town.”

“I traded my classic vinyl collection in for Huey Lewis & the News records just to piss off my friends,” Gould remembers. “It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done but for about 10 minutes I got a lot of satisfaction out of it.”

Faith No More’s fortunes changed when they sacked Mosley and replaced him with 20-year-old Patton in 1988. The singer’s nomadic solo career has explored his art-rock sensibility and remarkable six-octave voice, but back then he looked like a long-haired MTV pinup and could sing like Axl Rose. Relatively late in the day, Faith No More stumbled into the zeitgeist. The Real Thing sold more than 4m copies and had them playing alongside hair-metal bands such as Whitesnake. They found it, to use their favourite word, “interesting”, but they wanted to shake things up.

“We wanted to make the most of it by putting something interesting out there while we had people’s ears,” Gould says. Unfortunately, their US label, Warners, was banking on a more commercial followup. They neither expected nor wanted 1992’s wildly experimental Angel Dust, which included a Tom Waits homage, a homoerotic cheerleader anthem and the theme from Midnight Cowboy.

They are genuinely disbelieving when I tell them that I remember Angel Dust, now considered their masterpiece, getting great reviews. When it came out, they were supporting Guns N’ Roses and their crowd didn’t take to it at all. The dissonance triggered an existential crisis that Faith No More dealt with by waging guerrilla warfare on the headliners. It got so bad that they were almost fired from the tour. When Axl Rose has the moral high ground, you know you’ve gone too far.

“If it hadn’t gone on as long it would have been OK but we did it for about six months,” Gould says. “It got to be like this was our life. It’s like working in a job with people you don’t understand and who don’t understand you.”

“We were smart-alec obnoxious people,” Bottum says. “We shit all over that camp. We had to prove that we weren’t that.”

“It makes you examine yourself,” Patton says. “‘Is this who we are now? This isn’t my deal.’ You overdo it sometimes. There I am, peeing on [Axl Rose’s] teleprompter.” He looks rueful: “I didn’t really have to do that.”

Faith No More’s confrontational philosophy is summed up by their choice of cover versions. In the 80s, they irritated the arty San Francisco punk crowd with covers of rock anthems such as Van Halen’s Jump and Black Sabbath’s War Pigs. “It was an ironic fuck-you thing that would piss people off,” Patton says. Once they had a heavy metal audience who cried out for War Pigs it was, naturally, time to replace it with a faithful reading of the Commodores’ ballad Easy.

“The best possible scenario,” says Bottum, “is if we leave people confused.”

Stream Faith No More’s Sol Invictus on Spotify.

Few bands have blown their chance of sustained mainstream success with such creativity and dedication. Guitarist Jim Martin, the band’s unreconstructed metalhead, jumped (he says) or was pushed (they say) in 1993. “What we wanted was his guitar-playing style,” says Bottum. “Not so much his persona or attitude, but the two go hand-in-hand.”

Faith No More’s next two albums were made under difficult circumstances and their morale plunged. When Patton announced he was quitting in 1998, he found that everyone else felt the same. Just as young rap-metal bands were drawing inspiration from The Real Thing, and thorny outliers such as System of a Down were exploring the anything-goes spirit of Angel Dust, Faith No More were done. “We did it until we couldn’t do it any more,” Bottum says simply.

The ex-members didn’t reconnect en masse until Bottum’s wedding in 2008. Slowly they rekindled their relationships, made amends for old transgressions and, minus Martin, announced comeback shows. As often happens with misunderstood pioneers, Faith No More’s reputation ballooned during their absence and their return was welcomed with open arms. There was no pressure to make a new album but, driven by Gould, they secretly started swapping song ideas. Improbably, these evolved into their best record since Angel Dust, full of counterintuitive musical collisions.

“To hear anything one of us does at this point is fascinating,” Bottum says. “I think I know these guys and then they’ll do something that’s like: ‘Wow, that is really fucking weird.’ I think we accomplished what we need to accomplish. If we all died today I think we would have done a good job.”

Even though they have no plans for any more shows or records, Faith No More do come dangerously close to endorsing the uplifting narrative they find so boring.

“Doing what we’re doing now makes all of that work we did then a lot more validating,” Gould agrees. “We came back and we made it better. If that’s the only lesson we learned, that’s a good lesson.”

The night before our interview, I watch Faith No More play at the Roundhouse in Camden Town. They perform in white, surrounded by bouquets of flowers, like an avant garde wedding band, accompanied by a man in a black rubber gimp costume. They only play one song from The Real Thing and subvert the climax of their most beloved song, Midlife Crisis. Their more bizarre songs remain as inscrutable as riddles in a made-up language. The difference between now and 1992 is that the audience enjoys being confounded.

“I don’t know who our fans are,” Patton admits the next day. “I’m still fucking mystified. I was looking at them last night thinking: ‘Who are you?’”